6 minute read
Pathfinder conversations: Finsbury Park and Stroud Green Neighbourhood Forum & ImaginePlaces
Summary
Project team
Finsbury Park and Stroud Green Neighbourhood Forum & ImaginePlaces
Scale
Emerging tall building cluster around a busy intermodal transport hub
Context
Urban | North London
Focus for code
To secure community benefit from the forthcoming development and regeneration of the Finsbury Park Station Quarter, ensuring it is fit for 21st century civic life with excellent facilities, services and sociable spaces for residents, businesses and visitors of all means, ages and abilities.
Date for implementation
Via the Neighbourhood Plan adoption route
Key actors
Team overview
Finsbury Park and Stroud Green (FPSG) Neighbourhood Forum – is the designated Forum to create a statutory Neighbourhood Plan for the area. Members are volunteers living or working in the area and have a diverse expertise including planning, architecture, building heritage and legal advice.
Lead consultant
ImaginePlaces leading co-design methodology, code strategy and coding.
Other consultants
Ash Sakula Architects and Urban Movement
What are you trying to achieve with the code?
We’d like to improve the development outcomes in the area around Finsbury Park Station which we identified as our code area and which we called ‘Finsbury Park Station Quarter’. More than 100,000 people use it daily and it is earmarked as a growing cluster of taller buildings. The code aims to support the creation of a more healthy, safe, sociable and affordable place. Our code is particularly ambitious and complex because it involves five separate entities –the three boroughs of Hackney, Islington and Haringey plus transport corporations, as well as additional landowners. We’d like to develop a coherent framework that brings all five together and inspires dialogue and partnership working between them all and with the community.
How did you apply or divert from the National Model Design Code (NMDC)?
Our design code aims to go further than the guidance in the NMDC on urban realm, spatial connectivity, and public space, and focusses on particular conditions around the Finsbury Park Station Quarter and the impact of taller buildings. We used a regulating plan, setting out the broad development parameters of the site, to make a start on coordinating the structure and public realm of the future Station Quarter in context of the anticipated taller buildings.
Finsbury Park Station Quarter is heavily used and congested, which poses challenges for the design code. We had to be innovative in reimagining some of the most difficult places in the code area. These ranged from bold suggestions such as a green bridge linking two parks on either side of the Station Quarter, to smaller code interventions such as providing seating and different types of public spaces, greening and extending the cycle infrastructure across the area.
How does the code tie into local priorities and strategic objectives?
Our design code is concentrating on a small area but it’s something we plan to extend across the wider Neighbourhood Plan area through the Neighbourhood Plan which we are developing in parallel. The Neighbourhood Plan will form part of the development plans for all three boroughs.
When you are developing a design code in the context of a neighbourhood plan making process, it’s even more important to establish common ground between the broad range of residents, businesses, and other stakeholder interests. The Neighbourhood Plan and Code, once finalised, will be put to a referendum vote and become policy, subject to a positive yes vote (>50%) by the residents. The design code is still a work in progress, but we hope our work so far will provide a rich basis to support further community, landowner and local authority engagement.
How did you bring community and stakeholders into the project?
We’ve had very good engagement with the community so far. Our research has included street engagement dialogues and an online survey, both led by volunteers from Finsbury Park and Stroud Green Neighbourhood Forum in collaboration with the My Place Pioneers, an initiative that empowers young people to co-create positive change in their local area.
At the heart of the co-design process we ran a full day open design workshop, inviting the resident and business community, councillors, landowners and officers from all three boroughs to explore aided by 3D models on development visions for each site and the area overall.
The community engagement, design day and place analysis have laid the ground for the code as it stands today. There is still a long way to go with the engagement process especially including the landowners and the wider community. We need to keep engaging at different times and locations to ensure the final design code has broad support. The Neighbourhood Forum has over 2,000 local members and while it cannot be claimed to be representative of the whole community which is very diverse and young, the FPSG Forum has the ambition to secure a positive referendum vote which will be needed to adopt the Neighbourhood Plan and the final version of the design code.
Describe some of the challenges you came across developing this code:
A lot of Neighbourhood Planning Groups (NPGs) cover much smaller areas and have a relatively narrow set of issues, whereas this one is very complex. It’s been difficult to engage the landowners and transport corporations that are key to the process, which may be due to the perception of NPGs as an outside entity engaging in planning.
NPGs rely on volunteers who have other commitments and sometimes move out of the area over the course of project. A lot of training was required to help some of our volunteers understand what design codes are. It involved lots of long sessions provided by the programme during working hours so not everyone could attend. Having a consultant who can steer people is really valuable – we appointed ImaginePlaces and her team who provided additional pro bono work.
What advice would you give to other NPGs trying to develop a code?
Write your neighbourhood plan draft first or alongside the code because it’s very helpful to have a shared understanding of issues and a vision for the future of the wider area to start off a coding project. Having neighbourhood plan objectives in existence when starting the more specific coding exercise makes the task much easier. Equally, a neighbourhood plan can carry some of the design ambition for the wider area, reducing the burden on the design code to cover all and everything.
Create clarity between the NPG and any consultants during the commissioning process regarding ownership of the documentation to avoid any misunderstandings.
Allow for delays in the programme and allocate sufficient time for learning about design codes across all stakeholder groups, and for viability testing.
